EDIT: Kaguya coverage is live now here! Can't understand a syllable except for "hai", but GO KAGUYA!!!!!

First time I've missed the ex in awhile...she could've translated!

EDIT2: Wow...they just showed a shot of what appeared to be a crowd of people in a shopping mall or something watching the coverage on a big TV...seems as if there's a lot of domestic public interest, which is always great to see!

EDIT3: She's up!!! SWEET launch so far...most beautiful launch site ever on a wave-breaking beach, and the high temp (29 deg C) plus undoubtedly high humidity produced this amazing shockwave donut of condensation around the payload fairing that stretched & transformed into a cylinder during max Q...really remarkable, never seen the like before. That H-2 has some serious juice! External cam showed the horizon of the Earth briefly, then cut to commentators...so far, running sweet & true.

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

Got to love that low-tech approach to illustrating the launch vehicle's progress on the broadcast - a hand held clipboard with stickers for each phase (e.g. 1st stage separation) that were peeled away one by one!

That was pretty funny. It was a bit Python-esque -- for reasons I can't quite explain, it reminded me of the French Sheep sketch.

And when they were outside, with the hardhats, it reminded me of Japanese game shows -- I kept expecting one of the men to suddenly have to go through some "challenge."

There's something about Japan that gets utterly lost upon translation to English. Beyond foreign, it's alien. I know there are some Japanese readers of this forum -- I would love to know from one of them if Americans appear inexplicable and alien to you. And -- are Europeans less so? Or more so?

SELENE will fire its largest thruster to propel itself toward the moon after completing two-and-a-half circuits around Earth. The probe will slip into an initial elliptical polar orbit around the moon about 20 days after launch, according to JAXA spokesman Satoki Kurokawa.

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